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"We are in strange waters here...where illness may wellness and normality illness"
Feb. 1st, 2010 | 11:14 am
The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks
I found this book while I was looking for another book in a little Bourke St. bookshop one day. i did find the book I needed but this book really stood out, probably because of its title. So I had a flick though, trying to keep my eye on the shop assistant (who's already mentioned that I was in a bookstore and not a library) and I was fascinated. But I could only buy the one book and so I had to leave with a copy of 'The Frog who Croaked Blue' (highly recommended) for a friend of mine.
But the book title stuck. I just never got around to reading it. Until I found out that I was studying a music based subject at uni and I felt like reading some of Sack's work about the brain and music.
And so began the journey.
The book is divided into four part: LOSSES, EXCESSES, TRANSPORTS and THE WORLD OF THE SIMPLE. And each part discusses particular medical cases.
Of course, the man with the hat is first. Dr. P is a music teacher who is sent to Dr. Sacks with the understand that he has a vision problem, nothing serious, just something that provokes Dr. P to make silly little mistakes of memory. But there was no 'visual' problem, just the mistakes.
And curious mistakes they were, as Dr. Sacks found out then Dr. P was asked to replace his shoes after his check-up:
"Can I help?" I asked
"Help what? Help whom?"
"Help you put on your shoe?"
"Ach" he said, "I had forgotten the shoe...The shoe? The shoe?" He seemed baffled.
"Your shoe" I repeated, "Perhaps you'd put it on?"
He continued to look downwards, though not at his shoe, with an intense but misplaced concentration. Finally his gaze settled on his foot.
"That is my shoe, yes?"
Dr. P had visual agnosia, a disorder that strips away the ability to be able to recognise a visual object in its entirety, only by the sum of its parts. Faces are a good example. Patients with visual agnosia cannot commonly recognise faces as we normally do.
This is Einstein to us:
And this is Einstein to an visual agnosiac:
Einstein is the distinct moustache. It's only the distinct parts in faces that are recognisable. And that's what faces are, distinct parts.
Dr. P upon leaving Sacks attempts to pick up his 'hat' but clutching onto his wife's head, he wonders why his hat isn't moving.
The whole book is this wonderful collection of short essays written in a beautifully narrative way that Sacks is known for.
The LOSSES section follows with a tale of a 'Disembodied Lady' and 'The Man who Fell Out of Bed' two individuals who lost their sense of proprioception, their sense of their perception of where certain parts of their body are in reference to other parts of their body. So their hands suddenly didn't feel like their hands, their legs felt 'foreign' and 'not a part of their bodies'.
My favourite has to be the tale of 'The President's Speech' where a group of verbal agnosiacs have a fantastic time laughing at one of U.S. President Reagan's speeches, not because they could understand a word he was saying but because they knew from the facial expressions that he was making, whatever it what that he was saying was a very poorly constructed lie!
EXCESSES is a rather interesting section. It details the consequences of having 'too much' neural activity. Tourette's Syndrome features heavily but the best example has to be the case of 'Cupid's Disease' where a previously shy and conservative lady finds a new lease of life with a disease that makes her unusually happy, unreserved and for the most part excessively bright and vivid. When asked if she would like to suppress the symptoms of the condition, to return to a state of calm and order, she finds herself torn.
This is one example where an illness can be coined a 'wellness', she didn't want to lose it.
TRANSPORTS and THE WORLD OF THE SIMPLE highlights two very different worlds. The first involving the terrible or sometimes wonder world of altered consciousness and perceptions while the second points out the extraordinary minds of those we consider mentally deficient.
Although this book can be a bit challenging to read at times it's well worth. This is Sack's way of reminding us that we should be eternally grateful for the neurological connections that make 'us' who we are. Whether we have too much or too little or something entirely different at all.
* * * * (four stars)
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"This pearl has become my soul... If I give it up, I shall lose my soul."
Jan. 4th, 2010 | 12:09 pm
The Pearl John Steinbeck
I do love Steinbeck, he's one of my favourites. I still can't quite understand how he is able to capture the human spirit in really simple stories.
The Pearl much like Of Mice and Men really seeps into the core of mankind, this time through a Spanish folk-tale about a man, his poor peasant family and his majestic pearl. It's a cautionary tale of how materialism can quite literally tear us apart from the inside. Although I don't neccessarily agree with its notion of being completely satisfied with life as it turns out, I think we all need to be at least marginally dissatisfied in order to get through it. But this story does touch of the nerve of being happy without money. We've all heard it, money cannot buy you happiness, can it? I don't know, I do like Benjamin Wallace's interpretation of it. There is something to learn from reading The Pearl and if not, it still makes a great afternoon read.
I think I might introduce a new star system. I'm not entirely sure how we can stars on this this but for now I shall use these little things: *.
The Pearl: * * * * (four stars)
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"Do you mind," he asked, his lids clamped on a pulsing violet echo, "the pain we're going to cause?"
Dec. 31st, 2009 | 07:07 pm
Marry Me: A Romance. John Updike
I've finally finished this novel. I thought it would never end, I'm not saying that in a negative sort of way but one of sheer accomplishment, although I never really wanted to be entangled in the mess of this novel it was really difficult leaving it, much like not looking at a car-crash.
The premise of it is rather simple. The beautiful blonde and pampered Sally Matthias is married to the fat, blind and vacuous Richard. But she loves Jerry, Jerry Conant the soft and romantic cartoonist. But Jerry is married to Ruth and Ruth has a tempting secret of her own. And so this world-wind affair begins, Jerry and Sally, Sally and Richard, Richard and Ruth, Ruth and Jerry, Jerry and Richard, Sally and Ruth. Their worlds so inextricably different collide together after the climax of one hot, drawn out and tragic summer affair in Connecticut. No one knows where any of their futures lie as Jerry wholeheartedly admit his passion for Sally and Sally reciprocates his feelings.
It's rather cliché watching the unravelling of an affair. You cringe at the efforts of Sally and Jerry in keeping their affair secret yet you half wish it to work out for them. You bawk at Richard's arrogance and the way he treats Sally and everyone and his little playthings. And you feel the deepest hurt and regret for poor entangled Ruth who seems to be the victim of everything and everyone. All in all, this would seem like a very easy novel to read but Updike makes it the most fixating task.
After years now of reading text purely just to extract information it's really nice to sit down with such a beautifully written book and have to actually concentrate on what is written. Updike has a very beautiful way of constructing words into sentences, sometimes in such an intricate way that makes entirely no sense but makes the world of sense at the very same time. The scene that depicts the end of Ruth's unexpected pregnancy still stays with me and something so strangely described:
If she were pregnant, he would not leave her; if she were not pregnant he would. Sunday morning at first light, before the children were awake, and the mechanical chimes of the Catholic church across town beckoned to first Mass, she discovered that she was bleeding. In the bathroom she gazed down at the piece of toilet paper in her hand and experienced a clear perception in which the paper, the blood, the morning light intensified by the bathroom tiles, and he own veined hand were interlocked. A kind of photograph and been developed in the night. Her recent life, all her striving and confusion had come down to this, this spot of red on white, this simple stain. A letter from her body to nobody, a blank announcement of emptiness. In the manner of modern abstraction, what she held was not a hieroglyph or symbol of herself, that to which she had been reduced; it was, indelibly what she was. She flushed it down.
Strange but rather beautiful. Updike does that with his characters, he's so very honest about them, he knows their inner thoughts so explicitly and divulges their inner secrets so perfectly it was almost as if he were writing reality onto a page. The really of four people's life crumbling into non-existence.
The Chicago News put it the best: "Updike has cut a slice of life, the width of one town, the height of one feverish summer, the depth of four people trying to understand why their centre does not hold--and turned it into a mirror of our modern popular wisdom."
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"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream"
Jun. 27th, 2009 | 11:59 am
The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath
This is one time where you cannot judge a book by its cover. I picked up this book at a not so local library on my way home from uni. I was tired, I need some escape and was going to find it in a depressing 'young adult' novel but when I saw it on the shelf I put it right back and swore I would never ever read anything that had a ghastly cover such as that. I was so terribly wrong.
Two weeks later I was studying the controversial nature of shock therapy and lobotomy and Sylvia Plath's name popped up. Plath was a depressive creature, a suicide attempt by the age of 20 and years of harrowing electro-shock and insulin therapy but most importantly of all she was a writer. Amongst the most beautiful confessional poetry I have ever seen she also wrote one novel, 'The Bell Jar', a few weeks after its publication she killed herself.
I just had to read it.
The first chance I could I stormed backed through to the young adult section tore the book off the shelf and read the first chapter walking through the subway onto Flinders' Street.
It quite honestly defies description.
You can find so many things wrong with this novel when you first look at it: putrid teenaged suited coming of age cover, obscure title and vile blurb. There is nothing alluring about wanting to know what happens to Esther Greenwood, the thin, fake and fantastically smart girl who wins a scholarship to some swanky magazine firm, surrounds herself with dull and impervious friends and rancid sex hungry men. That is until you read the novel.
It's true Esther is at first a most dislikable character, her academic excellence leaves you envious, her whimsical view of men is unrealistic and her obsession with her non-existance can quite rightly leave you bored. But you have to see that that's exactly what Esther is, this void of a human gripped with a most profound sense of depravity, unwittingly trapped in the most relentless disease, depression.
We all seem to bawk at clinical depression nowadays, it's something that everyone seems to suffer every now and again. The Beyond Blue posters on the trams stalk you on a bad day and every one knows someone whether it be a friend of a friend's cousin's grandmother who's taking anti-depressants because they find life too difficult it's not hard to sit and wonder what the big deal is. So you're sad, wow. You'll get over it, right? No. And that's the most poignant point in this novel. Depression is not a temporary sadness it a colossal fall into depths of emptiness, non existence. And Sylvia Plath describes this condition within her historical context with the utmost precision.
Esther is a girl trapped in a bell jar. All the precious comfort of her life that we see her take for granted in the first couple of chapters starts to crumble away as Esther is gripped with intense delusion. A wonderful thing about this novel is that it is narrated in the first person and you get to see first hand how Esther tears away at herself and strips bear every character present within the novel beside her. Her mother is pathetic and weak, her friends are counterfeit and careless (pay particular attention to Joan) and her if you could call him her boyfriend, Buddy, is the most simplistic flake of a man who could possibly encounter. And everything, everything, pales away into this monotonous insignificance and it seems almost logical that Esther pans out the way she does. Absolutely logical. And Sylvia Plath seems the only one adequate to describe this descent into darkness so beautifully:
"I lifted my razor and let it drop of its own weight, like a guillotine, on to the calf of my leg. I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe."
Its tragic scenes like this (oh and I assure you there are many more) written so poetically that leave you abstract from the real anguish of Esther's actions and sometimes it just leaves you so bitterly numb.
For the most confronting delve into the world of psychosis, Plath's phenomenally written 'Bell Jar' is simply, a must read.
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Oh dear...
Jul. 12th, 2008 | 10:16 pm
What's even worse is that I had this whole reading challenged planned. I wrote a list, even coloured the months their specific colours (perhaps to somehow induce a sense of responsibility?) and adapted it to cross out the titles I had already read (something I will have to re-teach myself).
Now this wonderful animated list is redundant and I have to resign myself to the fact that I shall probably never read twelve books in twelve consecutive months, while studying. It is humanly impossible.
This means my list shall be revised. It goes from this:
'The Go Between' L.P. Hartley
To this:
'The Go Between' L.P. Hartley -never finished
But on a lighter and more spherical looking note, I am reading a novel at the moment, of which I have consumed a third and will write a review of. I'm terribly excited.
* haven't been reading= this statement excludes all the horrible jibberish I have been consuming for uni. It's all consists of scientific nonsense that I probably won't consider important in four years time. The most thrilling bit of reading was perhaps a philosophy text dealing with personal identity. Rubbish. I lie. It was ghastly.
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BLINK: the power of thinking, without thinking.
Feb. 22nd, 2008 | 03:28 pm
This isn't one of my challenge books but I do think it should be duly noted that I do read about twice the amount of non-fiction matter than I do fiction. I've never been able to figure out why. I suppose it's that incessant need to process information (this is what high-school hardwires you to do) or to constantly search for an answer.
So, I thought, I should list some of my all time favourite non-fiction books, starting with 'Blink', the one I have most recently read.
'Blink' is a difficult book to describe in words. It's ultimate goal is to show you the power of intuition and ultimately it's setbacks. But it does so in a very different way. The entire book is composed of anecdotal evidence and I mean the entire book. This makes the book an amazingly easy to read (your right side of your brain loves stories, it really does), it keeps you engaged from start to finish. But although 'Blink' wows you with the superiority of split second thinking and inundates you with beautiful examples of thinkers who use their intuition with utmost supremacy, it never once tells you how to harness this potential yourself. This I found very frustrating the for the first chapter. So it should be noted that this isn't a self-help book at all. It merely illustrates a psychological phenomenon. That said, once you've realised you are not going to be preached at, 'Blink' manages to completely change your perspective of analytical thinking.
It sort of laughs in the face of modern conscious analysis. In fact 'Blink' asserts the fact that we can make a momentary decision based on very little information at all (called 'thin-slicing'), simply because our brains have been wired to do so, it's a survival mechanism. And we all know it, it' s just that we don't know that we know. For example, we all judge people from the moment we see them (I think it takes three seconds, something like that. I know that women really spot the backs of shoes. Weird fact.) and although this judgement can be marred with social prejudice and racism, we often 'know' what we 'feel' is right about this person and most of the time we're absolutely spot on. Apparently reading body language is our most fundamental skill, as human beings. From the tiniest micro-expression on someone cheeks we can unearth someone's deception unconsciously without any effort (although this does take ions of practice, may I remind).
The most interesting point presented in this book is that conscious, drawn out analytical thinking (the type that is so loving paraded about at school) is far too slow and tedious to ever be used effectively in our day to day lives (yay!). One fantastic example used in the book was that of a fire fighter chief, who being called out to a kitchen fire in a house in Cleveland. After storming the house the routine way with his colleagues, the fire men proceeded to douse the fire, it didn't extinguish, it should have. The chief immediately sensed that something was wrong and ordered his men to evacuate the building, moments later the floor they were standing on had collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as thought. When the chief was asked how he knew to evacuate his team when he did, he couldn't not answer, pegging it down to 'ESP'. It took hours of 'analytical' questioning to find come to the source of the chief's intuition. The dubious feeling of danger that the chief experienced was really due to the fact that the fire 'didn't behave the way it was supposed to' it a) didn't respond to water b) it was far too hot and c) it wasn't noisy. All of this information was collected and decided upon on in one fleeting moment, a 'blink' moment. If the chief had talked the process through rationally (as is encouraged everywhere), considering every possible problem and solution those firemen would have perished.
All those times your gut feeling has been the 'right' feeling doesn't seem so very mysterious anymore. Almost a voyeuristic peek into the human psyche.
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"it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living anyhow"
Feb. 2nd, 2008 | 03:14 pm
'The Outsider (The Stranger)' Albert Camus
"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure."
That was the first line. And I didn't know what to make of it.
"A moment later she asked me if I loved her. I said that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I suppose I didn't.
"I'd rather lost the habit of noting my feelings"
Mersault's disjointed experience of the world is scorned by his greater society which leaves him ironically, outside a world from which he is already disconnected. And although he is able to play the role of the average human being with a simple air, eating, breathing, working with perfect diligence even fabricating an odd passionate fling with a girl, he unwittingly butts himself against a world that cannot contain him. When accused of the heinous crime of murder, it is 'the outsider' who's honest character is convoluted and pushed further into the field of disillusion.
Disturbingly mind provoking.
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"When a Stargirl cries she does not shed tears, but light"
Jan. 24th, 2008 | 05:53 pm
The New York Times acclaim for 'Stargirl' puts the synopsis of this novel into very accurate terms: "a poetic allegorical tale about the magnificence and rarity of true nonconformity" and although this story is marketed to 'young adults' it touches a theme that some adults often struggle with, conformity.
"Nobody has the time," she said. "The time cannot be owned.' She threw out her arms and twirled till her multi-coloured skirt looked like a pinwheel taffy. "The time is free to everyone!"
Jerry Spinelli makes this novel a true masterpiece not only with the perfect hero's triumph and thrilling and complex characters but with his elegant writing. Marta did warn me that this novel can sound deceptively simplistic but she also did mention to look out for the beautiful metaphors and I share this favourite metaphor with her:
"She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew."
I appreciate this novel from a non-conformist standpoint. Yes, I too am a non-conformist, not because I am still a teenager and think the world wants to eat me or I have some ridiculous point to stress but simply because I value difference and uniqueness. I don't snub my nose at elitist societies (although I do wish I were a part of them) or carry the dreaded 'tall poppy syndrome' that Australians are well known for, nor do I shun those who are drastically different to what I consider 'normal'. But because I am human too I do understand the need for conformity because we are a communal species, we need to belong in order to survive. But what 'Stargirl' touches on that no conformist can deny is that when our identity as a group becomes so globalised we no longer have identity at all.
n.b. For the keen ones, Marta does an excellent review of this story as well.
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“Nobody gets to heaven and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their heads.”
Jan. 23rd, 2008 | 07:43 pm
'Of Mice and Men' John Steinbeck
[http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/static/c
“Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love” [Susan Shillinglaw]
Fundamentally a short novel it does not lack impression. From the first chapter I was dragged into the desperate and lonely situation of these men as they battle to secure their dream of independence. And immediately I struck a fantastic affinity with Lennie. Simple-minded Lennie rises through the novel as a gentle soul, seeking only validate himself in the eyes of his greatest companion George and remains undoubtedly steadfast to his shared dream, his one day being able to tend the rabbits that George will breed on their small holding.
“Let's have different colour rabbits, George”
“Surely we will” George said sleepily. “Red and blue and green rabbits, Lennie. Million's of 'em”
Facing torment by his peer and co-workers his curious nature leads him astray. But his beautiful vulnerability is unmatched and he remains the most poignant character throughout the novel. Lennie ultimately serves as a coarse reminder of man’s deepest weakness in the world, himself.
Although the harsh dialogue present through the novel is sometimes a little difficult to adjust to, Steinbeck manages to indulge his reader in a beautiful poetic kind of writing, reminiscent of the kind Scott Fitzgerald littered his works with:
“At about two o’clock in the morning the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows, and in and out of the beams flies shot like rushing stars.”
Each of his characters is written with such conviction that you empathise with them as if they were real, I almost wish they were.
A beautiful, thought evoking piece and one that I sorely recommend.
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"the ragged edge of the universe"
Jan. 23rd, 2008 | 04:28 pm
2008 should be a year of challenges. So content with nothing, I'm pushing myself to join the 'My Year of Reading Dangerously' (deliberately inspired by Marta). 12 books in twelve months (I can do more if I like). It sounds tolerable and well mystical. I do aim to publish reviews on each title, just to make sure that you're inspired enough to read them. Watch this space.
January:'Of Mice and Men'John Steinbeck'Stargirl' Jerry SpinelliFebruary: 'The Outsider (The Stranger)' Albert Camus
'The Go Between' L.P. Hartley- March: 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape?' Peter Hedges
- April: 'Lolita' Vladimir Nabokov
- May: 'Grapes of Wrath' John Steinbeck
- June: 'Catch 22' Joseph Heller
- July: 'For Whom the Bells Toll' Ernest Hemingway
- August:'Vanity Fair' William Makepeace Thackeray
- September: 'Wuthering Heights' Emily Brontë
- October: 'Clockwork Orange' Anthony Burgess
- November:'Anna Karenina' Leo Tolstoy
- December: 'Great Expectations' Charles Dickens
